Motherless Brooklyn

Description:

From Amazon: Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head.

subjects: Private investigators,  award:national_book_critics_circle_award=fiction,  Orphans,  Fiction,  Patients,  National Book Critics Circle Award Winner,  Tourette syndrome,  award:national_book_critics_circle_award=1999,  Large type books,  Fiction, mystery & detective, general,  New york (n.y.), fiction,  Private investigators, fiction,  New York Times reviewed,  Fiction, thrillers, suspense,  American literature,  Young men

Places: Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.),  New York,  New York (State)